photo: Gemma Reynolds

Tuesday 24 May brought together ClientEarth and the Zoological Society of London in an unlikely setting – Selfridge’s UltraLounge. It was the launch of the Promise of a Healthy Planet project. We invited a wide range of young people to come and celebrate the amazing natural world we have but also to draw attention to the threats which face it and which jeopardise its future.

So, we are trying to help young people make a contract with world leaders.
 
This document will call on those leaders to meet their commitments under the Nagoya agreement on halting biodiversity loss by 2020. The targets that were set for 2010 were all missed, so making sure we don’t lose rafts of species in a human-induced mass extinction event is something which requires action now.

These ambitious but necessary goals will go a long way towards ensuring that sustainable development and intergenerational equity are at the forefront of world leaders’ minds as they meet in Rio de Janeiro in 2012. At this United Nations meeting the issues of climate change, sustainable development, poverty and biodiversity will come together.

The young people at Selfridge’s on Tuesday are a reminder of what ClientEarth is all about: protecting the planet and the natural environment for future generations. But the idea of what might be termed intergenerational justice dates back a bit further.

In 1983 the UN convened the Brundtland Commission, or the World Commission on Environment and Development. In 1987 its report, Our Common Future, was published. It laid out the idea of sustainable development  which “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

As climate change threatens to cause harm to ecosystems and livelihoods, and as biodiversity loss continues unabated, the state of the planet we will hand down to future generations looks bleak.

In recent years however, a few interesting examples of using decision making and legislature to enforce intergenerational justice have come to light.

In Hungary, a Commissioner for Future Generations was created in 2008 and is one of only four ombudsmen  in the country. The Hungarian Constitution states that every citizen has the right to a healthy planet and the Commissioner investigates any issue which may affect this right. The Commissioner then presents the reports to public bodies and is involved in consulting on legislature.

In 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit twelve year old Severn Suzuki made a speech to world leaders imploring them to act to protect the planet for young people like her.

Out of that Earth Summit, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was born and would become the home for international climate negotiations to this day. 17 years later in 2009, the youth community submitted an application to become an official constituency at the UNFCCC. The application was successful and the youth constituency, named YOUNGO, was born. This granted young people the right to intervene in UNFCCC negotiations. This was a major step towards recognising young people’s rights in a decision-making process the consequences of which they will be living with for years to come.

More recently, in the US young people have launched a legal attempt to sue their government by taking the view that the atmosphere is a public good entrusted to lawmakers. Kids vs. Global Warming uses the concept of public trust which says that anything which is property is not wholly the property of the owner. By allowing global warming to occur, the government is allegedly neglecting its public trust duty as a caretaker of the atmosphere on behalf of future generations.

These examples illustrate not only the possibilities for incorporating sustainable development into national and international decision making processes; they also demonstrate the hunger young people themselves have to be active in guaranteeing the health of the planet they live on. That’s why over the next 12 months we’re going to help them make sure that they inherit the healthy, flourishing planet they deserve.

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A more detailed summary of the recent history of intergenerational equity can be found in this article by Kirsty Schneeberger MBE.